I'm trying to create a very basic pong game that can be played over the internet or over a network, now I have the game which can be ran on one computer and two players can play it, so I can split it up into a server and a client, the server will ofcourse hold all of the information, bat position, ball position, score blah blah blah, and the client will just receive the data and use it to display the ball bats and what not.

But I have looked around at many tutorials about java networking (most of them are out of date), and I still can't really get my head around it. Many tutorials say to use InputStream and OutputStream, I know an InputStream can read in files and what not, but not sure about OutputStream, now I have seen the socket class in action from tutorials, but I really can't understand that ... well ok so for example

You probably should read through the FAQ for the forum. It answers many of these questions, and has pointers to more other answers.In general:Servers and clients generally should use non-blocking I/O of some sort.Game networking is generally based on binary, efficiently packed packets, not on text formats or object serialization.

So what would you suggest for me to pass around coordinates to clients? I have been asked to create it using TCP first, then using Multicast, so using an object is good for TCP but I was told sending objects is harder in multicast? Is it bad to use InputStream and OutputStream for networking?

hplus0603 I have looked at the FAQ and alot of the links are dead or link to C++ or another language which is a shame , smr I just looked at your link, I have no understanding of that at all so I will look for some tutorials. But also just a quick question, Now hplus you stated that InputStream and OutputStream is not really at all the best way to send data over a game network, could you suggest a method? It would nice

alot of the links are dead or link to C++ or another language which is a shame

Networking works the same, more or less, no matter what the language. If you're saying that the only language you currently know is Java, then you probably need to learn some C/C++ programming first. Networking, when understood, needs a lot of low-level knowledge, which you'll get by understanding C programming. Then you can learn sockets with C. Then you can apply that to Java.

Well I understand C++ and Java, but I have not messed around with C at all, I have a month or so to do this so Learning C to get all the way to java networking maybe for another time , But still what way would you go about sending data over a network? and using Multicast? Just so I can research

ah ok maybe why I can't get any information about it, well here is a quick question, Looking at this link here http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/networking/sockets/clientServer.html it has the code for a server that will commuicate with a user and an upgraded version to handle multiple users, I have ran the code and commented it and at last I'm finaling starting to understand it, but just one little tiny bit I'm still a little confused with, the client and server both have input and output streams of some sort, the server has hold of the clients what? output stream or input stream? and what does the client have a hold of on the server? the servers output stream or input stream? I just can't figure out which stream is used for what , they seem quite equal.

My Java is very rusty. I would assume that the client has an output stream that writes to a socket. The server will then have another, connected, socket, which it reads from using an input stream. To return data (over TCP sockets,) the server would then have an output stream connected to the same server-side socket. Finally, data that the server writes ends up received on the client socket, and read from that socket by the client through an InputStream.

the server has hold of the clients what? output stream or input stream? and what does the client have a hold of on the server? the servers output stream or input stream?

Don't get confused here. The Java Server Socket library is a wrapper for using TCP/IP networking communication. Any socket, whether a client or server socket, has both an input stream and an output stream. It reads data "in" from the input stream and writes data "out" to the output stream. But the server or client doesn't hold a stream from the other code. You can write a client that talks to a Google server and gets the home page. You have no idea what language or operating system Google is using, and that's the point. The TCP/IP protocol handles all that crap for you so you can just write code. And all the (really) low level code is wrapped up in the ServerSocket library.

If you write data to an output stream, then the server would need to read from the output stream if is held a reference to the same stream. But it doesn't work that way, because that would get really difficult. It is client output the input? This stuff's hard enough without something like that to worry about.

Start you server, and accept() a connection, which will block waiting for someone to connect.Start your client, and try to connect to the server.The server's accept() will return, and allow the client to connect.Now the server reads some data. Since there is no data to read (because the client hasn't sent anything) it will block.

Then the client will be connected, and can send data. After sending data, the client will attempt to read() the response, which will block.The Server will get the request, do something with it, and return a response. The server then tries to read some more data().

The client then reads the response. And so one. I suggest trying to get a simple client that connects to www.google.com and pulls some data before trying to write the server too. Once you know you've got the client working, if it is broke, it's the server.

Glass_Knife that is awesome mate , well we have been given a pong game which needs to be converted so, I understand most of it now, but yea, still the inputStream and outputStream is alittle confusing, but I'm going to do some hard debugging and testing using the oracle network tutorial which is a knock knock server should help me out